Writer and futurist Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) is widely admired as one of the first science fiction writers. His dozens of short stories and his 51 books, which include The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, have influenced countless speculative fiction authors. All the above novels have been made into motion pictures, and scholars to this day study Wells’s books, theories about the future, and ideas about social reform.

Wells’s first published work, The Time Machine, made him a celebrity at age 29. In that book and the many others to come, he offers ideas about the future of technology and society. He anticipated aerial warfare, nuclear weaponry, satellite TV, the Internet, the sexual revolution, and the growth of suburbia. A socialist with pacifist sympathies, Wells argued for economic and other reforms, many of which have since come to pass. His writings so impressed the world’s literati that he was nominated four times for a Nobel Prize.

As a youth, Wells struggled in an apprenticeship to a clothier, briefly taught young schoolchildren, and finally won a scholarship to a science academy (today part of Imperial College London) where he trained under famous biologist Thomas Huxley.